U.S. Dismantles Last 10,000 Pound Cold-war Era Nuclear Bomb

The U.S. will dismantle this week
the last of its Cold War-era B53 nuclear bombs, the most
destructive weapon in the country’s arsenal, the National
Nuclear Safety Administration said today.

The 10,000-pound bomb is the size of a minivan and contains
about 300 pounds of high explosive surrounding a uranium core.
It was designed to be dropped from a B-52 bomber and produce an
explosion 600 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed
Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, according to the Federation of
American Scientists website.

The weapon was being disassembled by Babcock & Wilcox
Technical Services Pantex LLC, the contractor that operates the
agency’s plant in Amarillo, Texas.

Dismantling nuclear weapons is part of President Barack Obama’s goal to reduce the role of atomic weapons in U.S.
national security, Thomas D’Agostino, Under Secretary of Energy
for Nuclear Security and administrator of the National Nuclear
Security Administration, said in a statement.

“The world is a safer place with this dismantlement,”
D’Agostino said.

The B53 bomb, which entered service in 1962, was designed
by Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories. The U.S. began
to disassemble them starting in the 1980s. The last were retired
from the active U.S. arsenal in 1997, the statement from B&W
Pantex said.

Pantex consulted the national labs to design and build new
tools to dismantle the bomb because of the weapon’s technology
was developed by engineers who have since retired or died, the
statement said. “We knew going in that this was going to be a
challenging project,” B&W Pantex General Manager John Woolery
said of the bomb that workers there call “last of the big
dogs.”

The U.S. is also reducing the size of its operationally
deployed nuclear weapons to between 1,700 and 2,200 weapons by
2012, as part of a treaty with Russia, according to the nuclear
agency.